Cycle World From October 2016

Nonesuch Records is pleased to announce that it will release Gabriel Kahane's 8980: Book of Travelers later this year. The album's genesis began on the day after the 2016 presidential election, when Kahane embarked—with no cell phone or other internet-connected device—on a looping, 8,980-mile railway journey through the United States. Over the course of two weeks, he broke bread with dozens of strangers whose stories were woven into a song cycle that he subsequently premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) earlier this year. Written and performed by Kahane (vocals and keyboards), and conceived in collaboration with director Daniel Fish and designer Jim Findlay (set and video design) with lighting by Mark Barton, 8980: Book of Travelers is a personal yet expansive meditation on the idiosyncrasies and anachronisms of train travel, which simultaneously grapples with the wrenching reality of a divided country.

The Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä bring us Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony, an extraordinary work by any standards. Scored for extended Wagnerian woodwind and brass sections, posthorn, a large array of percussion, women’s chorus, alto soloist and boys’ choir, the symphony has a duration of over 100 minutes and is filled with extreme emotion, revealing what the composer wanted to say about his own connection with nature and humanity’s place in it: ‘My symphony will be something the world has never heard before! The whole of nature will have a voice in it…’ he wrote about this mammoth work.